Attorney General Phil Weiser files lawsuit challenging unlawful conditions on federal counterterrorism funds

July 23, 2026 (DENVER) – Attorney General Phil Weiser joined a coalition of 26 states to stop the Trump administration’s continued efforts to use billions of dollars in federal emergency management and homeland security funding to coerce states into complying with the administration’s political and policy priorities.

The conditions challenged in the lawsuit would require the states to change the way they conduct elections, including by transmitting lists of all registered voters to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and to assist the department in enforcing federal immigration law. They would also permit DHS to terminate any federal grant at any time and for any reason.

“Colorado receives nearly $19 million in Homeland Security and FEMA funding each year for state and municipal security measures and to protect residents from terrorism, cyberattacks and more. We sued before and were successful in stopping the Trump administration from holding these funds hostage to their illegal immigration conditions. We’re suing again, and we’ll win again, because the administration cannot force states to change how they manage elections in exchange for critical security funding mandated by Congress,” said Attorney General Weiser.

Attorney General Weiser joined two similar and successful lawsuits in 2025, each in federal district court in Rhode Island, challenging DHS’s efforts to condition billions in federal emergency funding on states’ agreement to enforce federal immigration law and DHS’s subsequent attempt to unlawfully reallocate federal homeland security funding away from jurisdictions it viewed as insufficiently supportive of the president’s political agenda.

Now, DHS and FEMA have established grant conditions for 2026 funding that again attempt to coerce the states into complying with the administration’s policy priorities. First, DHS and FEMA have again threatened to impose the same immigration conditions that they attempted to impose in 2025 on all federal grant programs. The conditions would require states to devote scarce law-enforcement resources to assisting DHS in enforcing federal immigration law. These conditions were found to be unlawful and were halted by a district judge last year.

Second, DHS and FEMA threaten to withhold 20% of each state’s counterterrorism funding if states do not change state election law to conform to the administration’s policy goals. The attorneys general assert that these requirements would force states to abandon years of work and millions of dollars of investments in their elections systems, all to obtain unrelated funding that Congress earmarked for the prevention of terrorist attacks.

Specifically, the challenged funding conditions would require states to transition to paper-ballot systems, conduct a mandatory 5% manual audit of voting systems, reconcile voters and ballots using a methodology DHS has not disclosed, and use DHS’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system to verify the citizenship of every election worker and every registered voter in a state’s voter databases. If states do not comply, DHS and FEMA will withhold at least 20% of each state’s HSGP funding.

Finally, the challenged funding conditions unlawfully claim unrestrained power to terminate these grants on a whim. The agencies are attempting to add a condition that would allow FEMA to terminate any grant program for any reason. This constant threat of termination undermines the stability and reliability that these critical programs rely on to be effective. Indeed, a federal court recently rejected the Trump administration’s attempts to interpret an existing regulation to have that effect.

The attorneys general argue in today’s lawsuit that the grant conditions violate the Administrative Procedure Act and the U.S. Constitution’s Spending Clause.

Joining Attorney General Weiser in filing the lawsuit are attorneys general of California, Arizona, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin, as well as the governors of Kentucky and Pennsylvania.

Read a copy of the complaint (PDF).

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Media Contact:
Lawrence Pacheco
Chief Communications Officer
(720) 508-6553 office
lawrence.pacheco@coag.gov